Have you ever seen End of the Century?
End of the Century is easily my favorite rock doc of all time. It’s raw, honest, thorough and, most importantly, straight-up bananas. I’ve never seen a career in music portrayed in a less glorified way, and there’s something so wonderful about that.
You get the feeling that, at some point, being in the Ramones was just sort of a 9-5 job for them. I’m sure they liked the music they were making for the most part, and I know they loved their fans, but at some point, the dream and the grind seemed to merge. The records never really made any money; they weren’t likely to sell out anything bigger than a modest theater in America, and no one in the band seemed to particularly love spending time together.
Somehow that train kept rolling for 22 years.
I discovered the Ramones around 2001, about five years after they broke up. They instantly became my favorite band. It was also around that same time that you couldn’t go anywhere without seeing a Ramones t-shirt. If they only could have survived a little while longer …
As much fun as it is to think about what could have been, tonight I find myself drifting back to the beginning of their career. I want to listen to that late 70s, chainsaw massacre, punk-pioneering Ramones.
I wanna go back to the Tommy era.
…
The Review
Ramones
Leave Home
1977
Leave Home is about as perfect as a sophomore release can get.
Obviously, there are several different arguments as to who truly invented punk, and they’re all equally boring. The fact of the matter is that there was a sound that existed after Ramones was released in 1976 that wasn’t there before. I don’t know if the Ramones were visionary geniuses, or if they stumbled their way into greatness, but I would bet my bottom dollar that it was a little of both. They were four guys from Queens who hated prog rock, loved the Stooges, and wanted to rock despite having no idea what they were doing. That angry, vengeful tenacity created a new sound that has been aped to death but never truly mastered by anyone else.
With a seminal debut record already released and well-received, not to mention a significant buzz in New York, the Ramones were poised to enter the next phase of their career with Leave Home. They had grown tighter as a unit; they were writing more consistently and the studio believed in them. Sire Records doubled their production budget from the first album, even hiring John Bongiovi’s cousin Tony to produce it.
The record came out in January of 1977 and barely cracked 150 on the Billboard Top 200.
Fellow Ramones fans know this to be the strange and heart-breaking tale of the band. With the wind at their backs and all the right moves made, they were still rarely able to make it more than a few feet off the ground at a time. While mainstream success continued to elude them, though, the records kept getting better. Such is the case with Leave Home.
Ramones albums consistently sound like compilations. If we didn’t know any better, one could almost make an argument that they were making conceptual art. It’s one classic banger after another in such quick succession that it feels like the needle might actually tear a hole straight through the wax. I’m no statistician, but I would guess somewhere around 60% of the Ramones songs people know came from the first three records. It could be because they house the best tracks, but I don’t think so. I think it’s because they literally sound the coolest.
I know that 1977 is the sacred year for punk, but I put it to you, Leave Home has a stronger and more polished sound than any other ‘77 record, apart from maybe Rocket to Russia, which is the other Ramones album that came out that year. It’s leaner, meaner and most importantly houses that signature Ramones buzzsaw guitar sound. The first album saw the Ramones helping to establish the punk rock sound. Leave Home saw them establishing themselves.
Maybe Leave Home wasn’t as instantly iconic as Ramones was but, pound for pound, it is every bit as good. I’ll take it one step further and say it’s a more fun listen. “Oh, Oh, I Love Her So” might be the single catchiest love song ever written. “Pinhead,” “Commando” and “California Sun” would become live show staples for the rest of their career, and for good reason.
And can we please talk about “You’re Gonna Kill That Girl.”
“You’re Gonna Kill That Girl” is the single greatest Ramones song that no one ever talks about. It’s punchier than a furry trying to escape a Trump rally, and it’s so tight that it would explode into confetti with one more twist of the screwdriver. Stop reading this and go listen to it, I promise I won’t be offended.
I think what I love most about Leave Home was that it saw a turning point where the band started writing more together rather than separately. I know that to be true because Tommy Ramone told me so himself.
…
The Tale
When I was in college, I turned a class assignment into a chance to meet the Ramones.
This story would hold more promise if it took place around 1980 and I were a student at NYU. Alas, our tale takes place around 2010, when I was a student at the University of Georgia. Joey, Dee Dee and Johnny were already gone. The End of the Century documentary had already been released years earlier. Former tour manager Monte Melnick had released On the Road with The Ramones nearly a decade prior. There wasn’t ever going to be a single note of new music from the Ramones again. The story had been told.
Fall mornings in the Grady building at UGA were always my favorite. The building itself felt like a self-contained high school in the middle of a university campus, but one that hadn’t seen much modern renovation since the 1980s. Walking into it felt like stepping back in time, and it was on one of these autumn-tinged nostalgic mornings that my professor was challenging us to step outside of our comfort zones.
More than a dozen years have passed since the prompt was given to us, so my exact memory of what it was supposed to be is admittedly hazy, but essentially, we were supposed to write about something in the media that interested us. It might have been that we needed to write about the larger impact something in pop culture had on society. That sounds a little heavy handed though, even for a college journalism class. In any event, what I do remember is immediately spending the rest of the class daydreaming about interviewing the Ramones.
I remember having lunch with my then-girlfriend on the bottom floor of the bustling student center. She paid for the on-campus meal program, and I mooched off her. On this day she could hardly get a word in as I stole fries from her plate and stared off into the middle distance.
“Just reach out to their management; it probably wouldn’t be as hard as you think,” she told me, finally abandoning all hope of a normal conversation.
“They’re not a band anymore; I doubt they have a press person …”
Then it hit me.
Social media was still a relatively young phenomenon. Myspace had essentially come and gone already, but Facebook was still “cool.” I figured I could reach out directly to any halfway-verified account directly connected to the band. If that didn’t work, I could research more recent interviews and try to find any scarce mention of a PR representative.
It would take some doing, but I knew I could at least talk to Monte Melnick and probably Ed Stasium. Those two would have been enough, but I also wanted to try my luck for CJ and Richie Ramone. No one had heard from either of them in a while at that point, and I figured they might talk to a college kid if he begged and pleaded. I knew Marky Ramone would be a difficult get, but he was out there selling hot sauce and condoms at the time, so it couldn’t be impossible. Tommy was the lynchpin, the punk drumming template, the last original Ramone. Attempting to talk to Tommy didn’t even seem worth it, but I couldn’t let it go without giving it a literal college try.
In the end, everyone but Marky agreed to talk to me.
All of them got the same pitch, which was that I wanted to talk about the Ramones, obviously, but I was equally interested in hearing what they had each been up to since the group disbanded. I was a true fan, and on behalf of the other fans, I wanted to use the piece to check in on the guys. I also wanted to use it to ask them everything I had ever wanted to know, but that was implied.
I had a plan for almost everyone.
I knew Richie would be interesting no matter what, because he was in the band for such a short and significant chunk of time. CJ had been a hero of mine, because he served as the avatar for all of us normal folks who wished we could have been plucked from obscurity and dropped into one of the most seminal bands of all time. I had interviewed Monte Melnick once before, so I knew he would give me great stuff. Ed Stasium had a new and different perspective than anyone else, so that would write itself.
And then there was Tommy.
Tommy Ramone was the legend. His name was in the original Ramones presidential seal, at a time when you couldn’t leave your house without seeing it. He helped craft the genre that I was obsessed with, not to even mention the band. His old interviews with the band were so smart and so effortlessly cool. Tommy was the guy in the band you could realistically see yourself being friends with. Perhaps Dee Dee Ramone best summarized it with his bonkers quote from End of the Century:
“Tommy was the type of guy who could go out and get some meat and potatoes and make himself dinner. At 21 years old, that’s a pretty cool thing to do. Rather than eat some dope and potato chips.”
I’ll never forget talking to him.
I was a broke college student without access to anything resembling professional equipment. Back in those days, you could get a microphone input to record audio that plugged straight into your iPod. The battery drained so fast that it was a race against time to get through and interview and save it to your computer before losing everything. I would put my cellphone on speaker, ask my questions, and then hold my phone about an inch from the mic to pick up the answers.
On this day I was in a Piggly Wiggly parking lot.
It was unseasonably warm, but I had to sit in my car with the windows up and the engine off so that I wouldn’t be competing with any outside noise. I was wearing the same Ramones t-shirt I had worn under my cap-and-gown at my high school graduation and would once again wear under the cap-and-gown of my college graduation. I was dripping with sweat and could barely talk from nerves.
Then the phone rang.
Tommy immediately put me at ease. I had always heard he was shy, but during our conversation, he was open and engaged. He patiently answered every question I had, even with my shaky voice, and at least pretended to have a good time while doing it. The conversation itself was a dream; we talked about everything I could have ever wanted.
He told me about meeting the rest of the band in high school and around the neighborhood, what the vibe was like in the beginning versus how it changed as the dynamics evolved, and even about the early relationship between Johnny and Joey before things famously took an adversarial turn. More than that, he talked about the songwriting process, what it was like to hear Joey sing for the first time, what he missed about the guys now that they were gone, and how he carried them with him wherever he went. He was poignant and warm, and it immediately became the favorite interview I had ever done.
When things began to reach their conclusion, I had a choice to make. I could thank him for his time, say my polite goodbyes and end the interaction in a professional and courteous manner. The other option was to awkwardly gush about how much he meant to me and what a die-hard fan I was, about how his music ultimately helped shape me as a human being and was always there for me at my darkest hour.
I chose the second option, and it was awkward.
Do I regret it? Not even for a second. It’s not even something I cringe about when I’m trying to quiet my brain to sleep at night. I gave him my overzealous praise; he sort of laughed and thanked me, and the conversation quietly petered out. I never expected him to hear it and decide to be my best friend and start the Ramones again with me on bass. I just wanted to tell someone that meant a lot to me that they meant a lot to me.
It would also end up being one of the last interviews Tommy Ramone ever did, which made that awkward interaction suddenly take on a golden hue.
…
The Aftermath
Tommy died a couple years after our interview.
After he passed, I wrote an article for LA Weekly where I essentially said in print everything I had told him in person. For years I couldn’t listen to the music without thinking about our conversation. Perhaps the greatest gift Tommy gave me was showing me that my heroes were human. He didn’t even have to talk to me, or even be polite, but he was. He did me a favor just because he was able to do one. He treated me like an equal.
I hadn’t thought about our interview in a long time, years even. I graduated college, moved to California, and lived what felt like a dozen lives between then and now. One day, recently, as I was passively scrolling through the endless social media drudgery, I saw a Ramones fan account from Brazil posted an excerpt from my conversation with Tommy. It made me want to go back and revisit it myself, and ultimately, tell this story.
Tommy Ramone will live forever in the speakers of every misunderstood kid who wants to make enough noise to remind the world they exist.
I’ll never be a Ramone. The band will never be again, and no one is pulling up in a white van to throw me a leather jacket and invite me along for the adventure. But I did get to tell Tommy Ramone I loved him, and that is worth so much more to me now. I hope he’s feeling safe, flying on a ray, on the highest trails above.
And I hope, somewhere in the digital world, our conversation lives forever too.
